Silicon nanoparticles are an area of intense study. Nanoparticles that are below about 10 nm are of interest because the nanoparticles, when reduced to particular sizes not found in naturally occurring element silicon, exhibit properties unlike bulk silicon. Various techniques exist for producing silicon nanoparticles of random dimensions, and those processes sometimes produce silicon nanoparticles below 10 nm.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/426,389, entitled SILICON NANOPARTICLE AND METHOD FOR PRODUCING THE SAME, incorporated by reference herein, discloses a method for producing quantities of uniformly sized 1 nm silicon nanoparticles. This ability to produce uniformly sized particles in quantity is an important advance in the state of the art.